Organizations increasingly rely on virtualization technologies to improve the flexibility, efficiency, and stability of their data centers. For example, virtual machines may facilitate business continuity and disaster recovery. Business continuity and disaster recovery refers to the capability to restore normal (or near-normal) business operations, from a critical business application perspective, after the occurrence of a disaster that interrupts business operations. For example, an enterprise may replicate virtual machine data to a disaster recovery data center and then, in the event of a disruption, quickly restore the virtual machine data from the disaster recovery data center.
Unfortunately, configuring and maintaining replication and recovery systems for virtual-machine-based data centers may be complex. For example, in addition to primary data volumes, replication and recovery systems may also protect and restore virtual machine boot disks. However, restoring data to the boot disk of a virtual machine through the virtual machine itself may prove impractical. On the other hand, restoring data to the boot disk of a virtual machine through direct operations to the storage of the hosting hypervisor may prove cumbersome, potentially requiring re-zoning of storage by storage administrators.
Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for virtual machine boot disk restoration.